historical and political thought in the seventeenth - RePub - Erasmus ...

Chapter 6. New tidings
Conclusion
The publications on the statue of Nehalennia and his posthumously published
Originum Gallicarum liber secured Boxhorn’s place in the history of philology.
The ‘Scythian’ thesis Boxhorn proposed in these works proved to be
the way forward; long after Boxhorn’s death it remained a source of inspiration
for future generations of philologists to come. How original and innovative
his ideas were, remains a matter of debate. They do, however, represent
the accumulative philological knowledge at the University of Leiden at that
moment in time. They stand out as prime examples of the philological-historical
approach that was so dominant at the University of Leiden and the rest of
the Dutch academic world in the first half of the seventeenth century.
In the second half of the seventeenth century this dominance became contested
by the new natural philosophy, associated first with Descartes and
later, more notoriously, with Spinoza, that promised a complete understanding
of the world along mathematical lines. 80 By taking the opening statements
on the first two pages of the Antwoord that suggest that doubt should ‘be the
point of departure in discovering the truth’ as our starting point, we have
tried to gain an insight into Boxhorn’s opinions on some of the latest scholarly
developments of his time, most notably the intrusion of Cartesian ideas in the
Dutch academiae and, closely connected to that development, the spread and
popularisation of the heliocentric model of the cosmos. Admittedly, there is
not much evidence to go on, and what there is, is scattered and relatively concise.
Yet it is also true that the evidence we do have all point out that Boxhorn
took a positive stand on the new developments taking place in his time in the
field of philosophy and the sciences. Both Descartes and Galileo receive praise
from Boxhorn for their contributions to philosophy and the sciences. More
importantly, they are especially praised because of their discoveries of ‘new
things’ and their new ideas.
We can try to explain Boxhorn’s positive attitude towards these new developments
by pointing out to the ‘open’, ‘flexible’, and ‘eclectic’ character of
the Aristotelianism taught at Leiden University, where there was room for
auctoritate collegae sui, Martini Hortensii, celeberrimi mathematici, quem scripsit idem expetere, nec
dubitare, quin maximam eo labore gratiam ab horum studiorum cultoribus sim initurus’. Ibidem, p. 937.
See also Boxhorn’s letter to Pontanus, November 24, 1638. Boxhorn, Epistolae et poemata, p. 121. Rienk
Vermij describes Hortensius as ‘probably the first full-fledged Copernican to hold a Dutch chair’ and
‘one of the most outspoken Copernicans in the Dutch Republic’, who ‘also appears to have genuinely
admired Galileo’. Vermij, The Calvinist Copernicans, pp. 126-28.
80 See, for example, Van Bunge, From Stevin to Spinoza, p. 65ff; Israel, Radical Enlightenment, esp. pp.
23-29; Jorink, Wetenschap en wereldbeeld in de Gouden Eeuw, p. 57ff; Vermij, The Calvinist Copernicans, p.
156ff.
189